Gotham Nights
by Rogue Knight1
Summary: A series of short, unconnected sketches of the night-to-night life of the Batman. Always dark, often brutal.
1. Justice

As he had done more times than he could count, the black-caped man burst through the window, ten stories up from the garbage-covered alley below. He moved with speed that seemed inhuman, despite his bulky gear, throwing a shuriken up into the only light fixture, a bare, fifty-watt bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling, pushing the woman, thirty-five going on sixty with her bruised eyes and cowering stance, down to safety as he moved towards the man who had brought Batman's wrath down upon himself.  
  
It was a scene that he had played a thousand times, on stages ranging from million-dollar penthouses to rathole apartments that made this place seem like a palace. It never once failed to turn his stomach.  
  
The man was big, with muscle-corded arms and solid beer gut, his thinning hair lank and greying, his eyes blazing with drunken anger. At his feet, broken and bleeding, lay the object of that anger.  
  
She was maybe five years old, pale and thin, wearing a threadbare nightgown that couldn't be much better than useless on a cold Gotham night, but cold was not her greatest problem. Her face was a solid mass of bruises and cuts, her eyes dull with pain. Blood dripped from her mouth, where a good dozen teeth were either knocked out or loosened, and blood gushed from her broken nose. Her thin, shivering body was covered with old scars and new welts, marks of belt, fist, electrical cord. Her left arm was bent in a way that no whole arm bends.  
  
Batman hit the girl's father once, to make him back away from her. He hit him a second time because he wanted to. Cartilage cracked beneath kevlar-gauntleted knuckles, and Batman relished the feeling.  
  
Once, twice, and again, the cowled man struck out with his fists, blackening eyes, loosening teeth, and bloodying further the already broken nose. A short, sharp kick to the left thigh dropped the man to the floor, where he writhed with the pain. Batman planted a booted foot squarely against the fallen man's ribcage, and the vigilante smiled grimly as he heard bone cracking.  
  
He seized double-handfuls of black T-shirt, hauled the man up to his feet, and higher, slamming him against the wall, cracking plaster with the impact. He held the man there, and savored his fear and pain.  
  
"Please, oh please, oh God pleaseoh please God no my sweet Jesus don't hurt me any-" The man's gibbering pleas were cut short with one brutal backhanded strike from the Batman's reenforced glove.  
  
"Listen, scum." The Bat's voice was darkness and gravel, steel and fire. "You want mercy?" The broken man wimpered, nodded, and moaned as the pain of the motion hit him.  
  
"You don't deserve mercy." He stared, eyes blurring with tears, at the dark visage with it's burning white eyes and fearsome horns, and sobbed.  
  
"What you deserve, filth, is to suffer like those two have been suffering." Batman hit him again, a hard short jab to the gut that reemphasized the broken ribs.  
  
"And I don't think you hurt enough yet." Batman released his hold, and the man sank to the bare linoleum floor like a sack of jelly. Batman grabbed his right arm.  
  
"Your daughter has a broken arm." Kevlar-sheathed muscles twisted, and the radial and metacarpal bones snapped like dry twigs. The man screamed.  
  
"Your daughter's been whipped." Batman drew a coil of jumpline, three feet of lightweight high-tensio fiber rope, and lashed the sunken man's back with all his strength. The fabric of his shirt tore, and red, burning welts raised on his skin.  
  
"Your wife has feared for her life." Batman seized his prey, and left through the shattered window.  
  
On the tenement roof, he made fast one end of his line around an air vent. The other end was fixed to the man's ankle. He hung suspended over the street like a pinata, sobbing and moaning incoherently. Batman smiled. He waited until the slowly spinning rope brought the man's face into view, then pulled a batwing-shaped utility knife, and stroked it gently across the rope. The inverted man's eyes widened, and a wetness spread along the surface of his pants.  
  
Batman smiled wider, and with one sharp motion he slashed through the rope, and watched as the man dropped for eight of the twenty stories between roof and street before launching a grappling claw at him.  
  
Reeled in like a fish, his leg torn by the sharp tips of the grapple that had saved his life, the man lay, broken and terrified on the tarpaper roof. Batman stood over him.  
  
"If you so much as spit on a sidewalk, from now until your dying day, I will know it." Cold white eyes burning in a demon's face, and huge spiked wings fluttering around him, he stared in horror at the Batman. "And I will come back if you push me. Come back, and finish this. Know me, and remember." The man fainted dead away.   
  
"Jesus H. Christ on an aluminium crutch." Breathed Officer Wilkerson, staring up at the slab of meat that hung like a pinata from the lamp post. "This poor bastard must have really pissed the Bat off."  
  
"Reckon he did," Wilkerson's partner, Greggis, agreed. He was looking, not at the battered man, but at his wife and daughter, who were being helped into an ambulance by a paramedic with tears in his eyes. "Usually, the Bat's pissed, there's a reason for it."  
  
Officer Wilkerson had to agree.  
  
He was cut down, eventually, and got his day in court as soon as the hospital discharged him. His wife had decided to press charges this time. He never raised his hand to anyone again, even after the cast came off, even during his ten years in prison for assault and battery. He remembered Batman's warning, and believed it. 


	2. Motherly Love

The stout, middle-aged woman was roused from uneasy slumber by a tapping at the window. Taking up her late husband's 12-gauge, she went to the fire escape, where a dark figure stood, with a struggling bundle in his hand.  
  
"Senora Lorenzo."  
  
"Batman." She lowered the shotgun.  
  
"I found him with a group of his friends, tossing rocks through a store window. I thought you might want to deal with him personally."  
  
"Gracias, Batman. I will see to it that you have no more trouble with my little Juanito."  
  
"Moooom," groaned the bundle in Batman's hand. "I've told you, my name is Juan. Don't call me that, it's a little kid name."  
  
"Juanito! I will call you what I choose to, you little hoodlum! Out on the streets at this time of night, making trouble such that the Batman has to deal with you! Come here now, and take your beating for this night's mischief!" Batman opened the sack, and let a skinny little thirteen-year-old drop to the metal grating.  
  
"Gracias, Senor Batman. I will take care of this."  
  
"He's not a bad boy, Senora. He just needs to be kept out of the way of temptation."  
  
"Si, and gracias once again for retrieving him. Buenos Noches."  
  
Batman swung out into the night, the sounds of a scolding voice alternating between english and spanish behind him. It would be some time before Juan Lorenzo made any more trouble on Gotham's streets. With luck, and motherly love, he might grow into a productive member of society.  
  
The sound of a wooden paddle striking a scrawny backside echoed through the alley, and Batman reflected that sometimes, love hurts. 


	3. Victim

Five minutes ago, Roberto Freeman had been standing tall, basking in the camraderie of his fellow Deacons, as well as the afterglow of what he had done. Now, he was flying backwards, blood and teeth shaping a low arc in the dark air as he hit the alley wall. Batman turned from the felled youth, who couldn't have been more than fourteen, and struck the side of another young criminal's neck with the knife-edge of his gloved hand, letting him sink to the pavement, and kicking the leader of the little group in the side of the head. The four others broke and ran. A batarang struck Paul "da Small" in the back of his head, sending his 4'11" body face-first into the garbage. A bolo whirled through the air to take the legs cleanly out from under Battling Bob,Who tumbled, breaking his nose on the hard pavement.  
  
Batman knelt by the small, dark-skinned body that had been the center of the Deacon's attention. He was too late. Her clothes had been cut off of her with knives, leaving shallow cuts in her skin, and she had been tied with the braided rags, hands behind her back, and gagged with them. Then she had been raped, and raped, and raped. Now she lay there, bruised, bleeding, dripping with blood and semen, her face mutilated by the dull knifeblade of a bored killer who, if arrested and convicted of his crime, would have all record of what was done here removed from his files when he hit eighteen.   
  
The brown eyes were hollow. They might have been lively once, ful of humor and intelligence. For a while, certainly, they had been full of pain and humiliation, helpless rage and muffled screams. Now they were beyond any of that. She breathed, but the spark of life that had been in her before was gone, and it wasn't likely that she'd get it back, no matter how long she kept the ability to breathe and walk and talk. A part of her soul had been killed in this alley tonight.  
  
Batman cut the bonds and the gag, and wrapped her tortured flesh gently in his cape, administering what medical treatment he could for her wounds. After a time she seemed to come to herself some, and fixed his cowled face with her hollow stare.  
  
"Damn you. Where were you when I needed you?" The question came out of her emotionlessly, as did the profanity. There seemed to be no anger left in her No feelings at all. Batman said nothing, but held her in his arms until, a few minutes later, her body gave up fighting.  
  
He closed her eyes, and put out the call for a squad car. Two of the ones who had done this were still free, still running. They were marked men. For ten minutes they could run, for an hour, a day, or a year, but eventually, the Bat would come for them.  
  
They knew it. It kept them up at nights.  
  
What kept Batman from sleeping was a reproach from a dead girl, another one he couldn't save, another casualty in a war where the only victory was not losing for another day.  
  
Tears blurred his lenses as he swung away. 


	4. Graft

Charles Digriz had never thought of himself as being a bad cop. He wasn't, he felt, really corrupt. Sure, he took a few little bribes here and there, but who didn't? He had made his share of arrests, and if they consisted of criminals who were too poor to buy freedom from him, what of that? Man has to eat.  
  
He got out of his patrol car and walked into the White Rabbit Club, his partner, Sam Heaney, trailing close. Sam had been Digriz' partner for a long time, and neither was cleaner than the other.  
  
The inside of the club was an inferno of whirling colored lights and thumping music, tight-packed with well-dressed men and mostly undressed women. The White Rabbit was a strip club, but it was also the front for Weeping Mal O'Brian, the sad-eyed gangster who had, over the years, watched the criminal empire his grandfather had built dwindle, pummeled by the Batman, chiseled at by ascendant crime lords, and weatehred by the ravages of time, until now only a remnant was left.  
  
"Hey, Pigs. Get out." The speaker was a huge, shambling man, whose bushy eyebrows and beard were all the hair left on his head, muscles bulging underneath his T-shirt.  
  
"It's us, Atticus. We want to talk to Weeping Mal." Digriz pushed past the hulking bouncer, and into the depths of the club. Heaney gave Atticus a shrug of apology for his partner's rudeness, and followed. The big man knew better than to stop them.  
  
In the back was the door to Weeping Mal's office. They went in.  
  
"You know, O'Brian, there's bound to be something we can pin on you, if we just look hard enough. Raid this place anytime this week, could turn up a whole mountain of evidence for felony cases."  
  
"What do you want now, Digriz?" Weeping man was tall, thick-set, with a fearsome great beak of a nose protruding from a red face, underneath a head of rapidly thinning red hair. He sat beneath a skylight that provided the only light in the room, faint and yellowish, and behind a battered and scarred desk, one hand inside a drawer, the other toying with a pencil.  
  
"Nothing personal, Mal. Man's gotta eat, ya know? Anyway, seeing as how we haven't given you any trouble this week, and weren't planning to next week, I was hoping you could find it in your heart to throw some gratitude our way." Digriz was smirking in an infuriating way, and trying to pretend that he didn't have one eye on the gangster's concealed hand.  
  
Weeping Mal turned his tired, sad eyes onto Heaney. "One Irishman to another, Heaney. How do you put up with this guy?"  
  
Heaney shrugged. "I get by."  
  
"How much gratitude were you planning to recieve, Digriz?" The question had a note of defeat in it.  
  
"Five hundred. A piece."  
  
Weeping Mal sighed. "At least you're not as greedy as the narcs are. Here." He tossed a bundle of cash onto the desktop. Digriz reached for it, and forgot to watch Weeping Mal's unseen hand. It didn't remain unseen, but came out, filled with pistol, and slammed against the cop's right temple, sending him to the floor.  
  
Weeping Mal stood, pulling the hammer back on the .45 revolver as the door opened, and Atticus came in. Heaney put his hands behind his head.  
  
"Should have done this long ago. It's a public service, killing a cop like you, Digriz. And it should do wonders for my self-esteem. Heaney, breaks my heart to kill another Irishman, so I'll have Atticus do it. Sorry." Heaney shrugged philosophically and waited for dissolution.  
  
The skylight exploded, and glass shrapnel filled the air in a cloud as a rock-hard shadow came into the small space. Weeping Mal was gently rendered unconscious in the space of one and a half seconds, while Atticus was being felled by a weighted batarang that impacted on his cue-balled forehead.  
  
"Batman!" exclaimed the normally placid Heaney. Digriz risked a glance up, and then stood, rubbing his head gingerly.  
  
"Good thing you got here when you did. We were about to slap the cuffs on him when he--"  
  
"Shut up." Batman cut off Digriz with the finality of a guillotine blade dropping. "I didn't come here for him." Digriz went for his piece then, but it hadn't even cleared the holster when he ghasped in agony as a series of sharp pains stitched their way down his right arm. A row of tiny bat-winged blades had sunk into his flesh, running from the elbow to the palm of his gun-hand. Then the punch came, and Charles Digriz was out.  
  
"No need for roughness, Batman. I'll go quietly. Expect you got the whole conversation taped, huh?" No answer. "Figure I might as well save you the trouble, and me the bruises." Heaney pulled his cuffs and fastened them around his own wrists. Batman watched.  
  
"O'Brian's a criminal. You're worse." The voice that came from under the hooded mask was darkness, coldness, and hardness. Heaney shuddered. "He just broke the law. You betrayed it."  
  
******  
  
Callaghan from Internal Affairs lounged against the doorframe and surveyed the bundle of men that dangled like a pinata in the center of the room. He lit a cigarette and chuckled to himself.  
  
"Think we should cut 'em down?" he asked his companion, Detective Marlowe from the MCU.  
  
"Reckon so." Marlowe answered. "Eventually."  
  
"About what I figured. No hurry, huh?"  
  
"Reckon they'll keep a while. Batman's pretty good at tying knots." 


	5. Working Nights

The pudgy man in the wrinkled suit dropped like a stone, his bald spot flashing in the street lamp's reflected light. Atop his back crouched a huge dark shape, binding his wrists as he lay unconscious.  
  
"Jesus, Bats, you're gonna scare away all the other customers." A brown-skinned woman with short bleached hair, dressed in halter top and tight leather skirt leaned on the lamp post, gazing at the scene with a mixture of amusement and annoyance.  
  
"This one," Batman said, not looking up from where he was searching the would-be John's pockets, "wouldn't have been good to deal with. He had this up his sleeve." Batman tossed a long, thin knife, blade curved inwards for a hook-like edge, designed to dig in and rip flesh. The hooker shuddered.  
  
"I've told you before, Rosa. There are safer jobs."  
  
"And I've told you before, Bats. You need to get laid every once in a while."  
  
He wasn't amused. He never was, as far as she could tell. "If I hadn't been here, right then, he would have taken you, and you'd have ended up butchered and lying on a church altar, just like the last three women."  
  
"You mean he's the Church Killer? No shit." She looked impressed, but not overly worried.  
  
"I've tracked him for weeks. Almost slipped past me, just now." He stood, his prey now tied securely to the lamp post, with a note attached for the police. "Cops will be here soon. You can be a witness if you want to, or move on." He turned to go.  
  
"Hey Bats!" She called. He turned.  
  
"I didn't know who he was, but I could tell right off he wasn't normal. And," she produced a Colt .357, "I was ready for him."  
  
"Think about it Rosa. Another line of work."  
  
"Thanks for caring. Really. Remember what I said about getting laid."  
  
He was gone, and she went elsewhere. She still had half a night's work to do, and talking to the cops would waste too much of her time. She headed for the corner by the pool hall. Business was always good there. 


	6. Firebugs

Toby Jones didn't ask much of life. A place to sleep that wasn't too cold and wet, a belly that, if not full, at least wasn't too empty, and a little scotch to ease his mind of an evening. In return, he was willing to let the rest of the world do whatever the hell it wanted. If he had been a reflective man, this lifestyle might have bothered him, but fortunately for him, he wasn't a reflective man, so he was content.  
  
He was just settling in for the night behind a dilapidated warehouse, staring at the moon shining on Gotham river about a hundred feet off, and swigging from his bottle.  
  
"Hey, old man. You ruining the view there." Toby turned his shaggy gray head to look behind him, and stared up at a lanky, pimply teenager, dressed in expensive-looking clothes and backed up by two others like him, one short and skinny, one tall and fat. The leader had a can of gasoline in one hand, and a Zippo lighter in the other.  
  
"Oh hell. Don't want no trouble. Don't want no-"  
  
"Shut your hairy face, old man. Hold him down, guys." The other two moved to obey. Toby tried to bolt, but age and scotch slowed him down too much. They got him by wrists and ankles, and held him down, stretched out full-length on the ground, while the first one began dousing him with gas.  
  
"You an eyesore man. Be more attractive if you was a streetlight, think so?" He flicked the lighter open. Toby sobbed incoherently.  
  
The flame was lit and coming close to Toby's face when something small and black sailed out of nowhere, and sent the stil-lit Zippo fying. Batarang, that's what it is, Toby thought. That's what they call those things, which means that...  
  
Like a bat out of hell, the huge man-shaped shadow came out of the sky with big fluttering wings behind him, spike-crowned face masked with dark fabric, the exposed lower half set in a snarl. Batman threw a kick that landed squarely on the leader's solar plexus, sending him down. The other two ran, but he threw another batarang, this one trailing a thin rope that wrapped around the two kids and jerked them to the ground. Behind the vigilante, the leader stood up, pulled a switchblade from the pocket of his designer jeans, and lunged for the black-caped back. Batman caught the wrist and twisted, sending the knife flying and creating a loud cracking sound that Toby could hear clearly even in his present distrought state. The kid was hurled through the air, landing in a puddle of spilled gas. He tried to stand, but tripped over the gas can that lay on its side. He tumbled forward, landing right on top of the still-burning lighter.  
  
There was an impressive whooshing sound as his hair and the back of his shirt sprang to light, and a scream of terror like the bleating of a sheep. Batman grabbed him by the belt and hauled him, running, towards the river, throwing him in. The flames were quenched before much damage was done to the boy, although his hair was half gone, and his expensive clothing was a total loss. Batman fished him out and tied him up, along with his friends. He left them hanging from the roof of the warehouse, dangling like a pinata, without the festive trimmings.  
  
Batman turned to Toby. "The police will be here soon. Once you tell them what they want to hear, go to this address," he handed a card to the bum, "and you'll get a free meal, a bed, and a bath. Just show them this card."  
  
"Good deal." Toby turned to inspect the dangling firebugs. "Hey, thanks for the-" there was nothing but darkness behind him.  
  
"-save." He finished lamely. Further ruminating on his part was cut off by the flashing of police lights. Oh well. It was pretty warm in police stations, and they weren't too rude to you if you weren't the one being arrested. 


	7. Full Circle

Full Circle  
  
It was happening all over again, and there wasn't a thing he could do to stop it.  
  
Out in front of the Monarch Theater, which still showed "The Mark Of Zorro" every year as part of their classics marathon, a married couple and their young son had been walking down the street, looking for a cab. The man was slight, wiry, not like big, powerfully built Thomas Wayne, and his wife was plump, with bright red hair tightly braided. Their clothes were a little shabbier than the Wayne's, and yet...  
  
Their son. Eight or nine at most, he could have been Bruce Wayne, lost ages past on a damp and misty night so much like this one. A night when someone stepped out of the fog, and fired the shots that tore a boy's life to shreds. Sometimes in his nightmares, there was only one man, who fled, sickened by his deed, and would not further damn himself with the blood of a child. Sometimes, he saw two men, and one had his gun leveled at Bruce's young face and was growling strange words as he prepared to fire, only to be pulled back into the darkness by his companions. Some nights, the killer was a faceless composite, borne of the thousand killers Batman had stopped. Some nights, he had the grinning clown's face of the vigilante's most brutal nemesis.  
  
The young family weren't having any luck finding a cab, and weren't watching their path. When the mugger drew his gun and growled his demands, they were caught flat-footed, frozen for a crucial, magic second. Behind Batman's dark cowl, there was a memory of how that second felt. Time slowed to a crawl, events became images, flashes of light and pain that returned to you in waking dreams, to dog your days and nights with horror.  
  
The mugger was not a patient man. As the magic second went by without any move to cooperate, he took action to expediate matters. Two hollow-point .45 slugs tore out of the muzzle of the cold, ugly weapon in his hand. The woman wore no pearls to be scattered upon the unhallowed pavement, bouncing like so many toy balls in the light of the dim street lamp for a thousand eternities. The sound of their bodies hitting the ground was like slabs of beef being thrown on the butcher's table, ready for carving.  
  
The boy who was not Bruce, but could have been, sank to his knees, stunned by the almost physical shock of what he had just witnessed. His eyes welled with tears, but he felt no sorrow yet, only numbness. That was when the Batman came into view, and began to race towards the site.  
  
Once, a robber and murderer let a child live after gunning down the boy's parents in cold blood.  
  
The gun boomed a third time, and the boy's head burst apart from the back, a neat hole in his forehead marking the entrance point, a splattering of blood, brain, and bone on the pavement to mark where it exited. The mugger vanished into darkness, without any living witnesses.  
  
A black shadow fell to earth in the cold yellow pool of light. A nightmare-monster of black wings and leathery flapping and wet fearful sounds at night stood, surrounded by the dead, those before him, and those who lay behind. His cowl hid his face, concealing the pain and the sorrow and the trembling rage. After a long, cold second, he turned away, and raced into the shadows and fog.  
  
He could not restore the dead. He could avenge.  
  
End 


End file.
